> The confederate statues are also unambiguously white nationalist monuments.
Most southern people do not know that. They do not think confederate symbolism is any different from say the British or French flag (which may have been associated with negative periods of history, but has meaning apart from that). https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/politics/confederate-flag-pol.... Whatever the original intention, confederate imagery transformed into a generic cultural marker. More “fuck New York” than anything else. When I was growing up in the 1990s in northern Virginia, even in liberal circles the notion that confederate flags were “heritage, not hate” was a mainstream position.
Unlike Nazi imagery, confederate imagery was not condemned immediately, and had more than a century to develop alternate connotations. Have you seen Dukes of Hazzard? It’s a liberal show about fighting small town corruption with vaguely environmentalist sentiments. They made a movie of it in 2004 with Jessica Simpson and nobody complained about the confederate flag. That’s what a large swath of the country grew up with.
Most people around the world will not condemn their ancestors, and will put up with a great deal of cognitive dissonance in order to avoid doing so. Japan has never formally apologized for its atrocities in WWII: https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/14/shinzo-abe-regrets-but-.... Does that mean you can infer that present day Japanese embrace and support the motivations of their ancestors that raped and murdered women in Nanjing? No, that would be fundamentally dishonest.
The deep irony of your comment is that Trump was the grownup in the room. He was addressing an important point that you cannot treat everyone that opposes taking down confederate monuments as white supremacists. That’s what the reporter was incorrectly trying to do, and he correctly pushed back on that.